Snow Day (Solution)

by John Wiesemann, Alex Irpan and Veronica Gross

This is a puzzle about video games produced by Blizzard Entertainment.

The numbers are the number of letters in each word of eighteen clues, with punctuation given. Below the numbers are banks of trigrams; the trigrams must be unscrambled to produce the clues. The first column is for the first box of the product key, the middle column is for the second box, and the last column is for the third box.

The unscrambled trigrams yield the following clues (answers in parentheses):

Once the product key is entered, a tower defense game is revealed. As clued by the flavortext, solvers must play the game well enough to get to the high score table:

#

Initials

Score

1

NAP

857679

2

PLY

846978

3

ASC

836984

4

IIT

807983

5

EON

797884

6

SCO

796873

7

THE

777968

8

ABL

738473

9

RES

717384

10

USE

656868

The initials are another trigram bank. Unscrambled, the message reads “Use ASCII Table on scores then apply”. The scores are the concatenated decimal ASCII table values for more trigrams: ULO TEN SET POS ONT ODI MOD ITI GIT ADD. Unscrambled [these are in the same order as the initials], the message reads: “add set position to digit modulo ten”.

This instruction is to be applied to the product key: in each set of six digits, add the position of the digit (1 through 6) to the digit, then take mod ten. The result is: 718578 – 807987 – 686982. These are also ASCII table values, and the answer is GUNPOWDER.